Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture

Nations and Nationalism 12 (4), 2006, 559–578. Nationalism and the cultivation of culture JOEP LEERSSEN University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands ABSTRACT. On the basis of an extensive sample of European source material, the article investigates the meaning and importance of ‘culture’ in cultural nationalism. The author argues that European cultural nationalism in the nineteenth century followed a separate dynamic and chronology from political nationalism. Cultural nationalism involved an intense cross-border traffic of ideas and intellectual initiatives, and its participating actors often operated extraterritorially and in multi-national intellectual networks. This means that cultural nationalism needs to be studied on a supranational comparative basis rather than country-by-country, concentrating on the exchange and transfer of ideas and activities. A working model is proposed which may serve to bring these ideas and activities into focus. In the following pages, I want to present what I consider a useful program- matic approach in the study of nineteenth-century European nationalism, aiming to bring into focus the culturally oriented initiatives and concerns of nationalist movements. This topic has hitherto often been dealt with piece- meal (in the context of nationally framed studies) or marginally (as an adjunct to socio-politically oriented analyses). I propose a different, transnationally comparative approach from a cultural historical perspective, by briefly discussing five tenets. These are: 1. All nationalism is cultural nationalism; 2. Cultural nationalism is a topic for cultural history; 3. Cultural nationalism requires a cross-national comparative approach; 4. Nationalism begins as a ‘cultivation of culture’; 5. The ‘cultivation of culture’ can be mapped as a specific array of concerns. The context taken here is specifically European. The obervations in the following pages can claim little or no applicability to nation-building processes in the Americas, Asia or Africa; the focus is on nationalism as it develops in Europe in the long nineteenth century. To compound that development, hugely complex as it is in itself, with other phenomena including anticolonial movements and modernisation processes elsewhere in the world would add an unworkable overload of variables. Even so, the framework presented here is already enormously broad in scope: to account for trends and patterns that would embrace Catalonia and Finland, France and Estonia, r The author 2006. Journal compilation r ASEN 2006 560 Joep Leerssen Germany and Slovakia, is almost fatuously ambitious. It is offered only as a working model; but offered in the belief, based on a good deal of source research in a fairly wide sample of national cases, that a firmly delineated typology of European-style cultural nationalism is feasible and, what is more, useful – not only as a frame of reference in order to sort out the enormous mass of historical evidence from diverse backgrounds, but also as a basis on which to envisage thematic-comparative research. All nationalism is cultural nationalism We do not easily speak of ‘cultural liberalism’ or ‘cultural socialism’; but the phrase ‘cultural nationalism’ seems plausible and straightforward enough. It stands to reason because the concept at the heart of nationalism, that of the nation, refers to an aggregate of people whose ‘peculiar character’1 is at least in part constituted by cultural factors such as language or historical aware- ness. Nationalists advance the right to national self-determination, cultural survival and cultural self-expression, as a self-evident and ethically autono- mous principle, alongside (not derived from) equality, justice and political stability. If anything, nationalism sees the state as a means to an end (the state should embody its constituent nationality, and derives its right to exist in part from that function2). Nationalism studies so far have not followed a clear approach to dealing with the cultural dimension of nationalism. Early studies (one thinks with special admiration of the work of Hans Kohn and Isaiah Berlin) approached nationalism as a topic in Europe’s History of Ideas, concentrating on the texts, the thinkers, the rhetoric and viewpoints that brought nationalism into circulation, and that ‘articulated’ the nation as a focus of political loyalty. While such scholars charted, with great learning and acumen, the discourse of nationalism, their analyses and typologies have since then been open to criticism; they seemed often to move in the rarefied atmosphere of elite thinkers and writers, with little obvious connection to the mass movement that nationalism was to become. Since the days of Elie Kedourie and Ernest Gellner, the emphasis has shifted from intellectual to social and political analyses. The focus has moved to the role of nationalist movements in modern state formation, and to the stage of societal development that could give rise to a nationalist movement. The famous ‘modernism wars’ compounded this.3 Gellner (1983) had been at pains to argue that the scholarly analysis of nationalism should remain aloof from nationalist dogmas and tenets (especially the belief in an extrahistorical, categorical and apriori existence of nationality). He therefore stressed the cleavage between the recent (nineteenth-century) emergence of nationalism as a constitutional ideology, and the primordial existence of ‘the nation’ that this ideology invoked, promulgated and in some cases arguably invented. ‘Cul- ture’ for Gellner meant mainly the rhetorical ammunition of nationalist r The author 2006. Journal compilation r ASEN 2006 The cultivation of culture 561 activists. Nationalism as an ideology was explained in terms of modernisation processes such as exo-education and socio-economic scale enlargement; its cultural engagement was taken out of the analysis and treated in general- formulaic terms such as ‘Ruritanian’ vs. ‘Megalomanian’. Hobsbawm (1990), for his part, also saw culture as a mere side product of wider societal developments and as an intellectualist tool fashioned with a political agenda. Those scholars who took issue with Gellnerian modernism (e.g. Armstrong 1982, Hastings 1997) sought not so much to quarrel with ideology’s nineteenth-century rise to prominence, as with the dismissal of a pre-existing and underlying ‘nation’. In their approach, the cultural agenda of nineteenth- century nationalism was brushed aside by the dominant, contested issue of the cultural existence of the nation. Thus, neither for modernists nor for their opponents do the cultural concerns of nineteenth-century nationalism seem to be very important. For modernists, the cultural rhetoric of nationalists is a legitimising smokescreen or a sort of extra-political fallout; for anti-modernists it merely reflects the ongoing manifestation of a pre-existing fact. All parties concerned tend to locate ‘culture’ outside the nationalist ideology, as a general, external ambience which was invoked or influenced; rather than analysing cultural rhetoric as an intrinsic part of, and commitment within, the nationalist agenda. This dilemma is still noticeable in John Hutchinson’s ground-breaking study The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism (1987). This is rightly considered as one of the outstanding works in the field of nationalism studies, and one which does focus on activism in the cultural sphere. Just how promising that approach is can be gathered from Hutchinson’s introduction, which opens a wide European panorama, situates Ireland in a wider context of cultural initiatives and cross-currents, and indeed gives us one of the best outlines of the concerns of cultural nationalism to date. Yet, while cultural nationalism is typologically and thematically identified as one of the book’s main concerns and preoccupations, the ‘dynamics of cultural nationalism’ is ultimately analysed in terms of the social position of cultural revivalists.4 Among nationalism scholars, then, culture and nationalism have been like oil and water.5 Modernists argued on the whole from societal modernisation models, and anti-modernists studied cultural activities as manifestations of the nation rather than as preoccupations of nationalism. Likewise, in the many valuable concrete case studies of developing national movements in nineteenth-century Europe (most of them oriented towards single countries, others in a more regionally comparative approach6) the analytical trajectory usually follows social-historical vectors, and refers to cultural activism in passing. Tellingly, the crucial dates by which periods are punctuated are always of a political, never of a cultural provenance. If we read of a newspaper being founded here, or a choral society there, or if we see mention of an edition of folksongs or of a certain historical novel, it is usually as an illustrative example, merely serving to indicate a wider, unspecified cultural r The author 2006. Journal compilation r ASEN 2006 562 Joep Leerssen praxis or climate. Quantitative details are foregone: few circulation figures, or statistical breakdown of contents; often, no dates are given, or at best something as broad as a decade (‘the decade following the Congress of Vienna/the manumission of the serfs. .’). Often the reference is to nothing more specific than a vague intellectual climate such as ‘the spread of the ideas of Herder’ or ‘romantic medievalism in the style of Sir Walter Scott’. What the reader gets are not cultural facts, but the cultural background against which ‘hard’

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